Knowmail scores $3.5M to apply AI to your in-box

Knowmail, an Israeli startup building what it calls personalized Artificial Intelligence help employees manage email and other messages better, has closed $3.5 million in new funding.

Leading the round is CE Ventures, with participation from existing investors AfterDox, Plus Ventures, 2B Angels, INE Ventures, and various unnamed private investors.

The company says it plans to use the new capital to continue building out Knowmail’s functionality as it gears up for a full launch early next year.

The problem that Knowmail has set out to solve can perhaps be best described as communication or information overload, something that it believes AI is best-positioned to tackle.

As the product exists today, Knowmail is an AI engine that installs on top of Outlook, studies your email habits, time management, and personal preferences, and is able to deliver the emails to you more appropriate to your needs.

Specifically, this means the ability to view emails that have been automatically categorised as ‘urgent’ (knowing that these need to be handled before anything else), ‘important’ (when you have additional time to attend to your email), and everything else.

“With this, employees can focus on what is relevant for them, rather based on what is newest, saving time from looking for the needle in the haystack, and thus get more of the right things done,” explains the startup.

There are a number of additional features enabled by Knowmail’s predictive model, such as one-click moving of a message to the predicted email folder, deferring an email for a later time/day to reduce in-box noise, and intelligent auto-complete search to find the exact email you’re looking for, and more.

In a sense, the product is a bit like Google’s Inbox but with more corporate or enterprise features. Oh, and there is a Knowmail bot, too, and newly announced Microsoft Cortana virtual assistant support.